Client Management Suite

Good morning,

I was wondering if anyone had any details or insight on an environmental issue we are dealing with. On one side of our house we are using workstations as PS's. There are about 1500 of them and for the most part serve us very well. However because they are workstations, the are from time to time shutdown or not availabile. This probably effects approx 4 or 5% of the boxes on any given night. Here is the big scenerio I am trying to understand. If we were to check our Package Summary reports each morning we might find 50-60 PS's that have all of their packages invalid. If you were to then resend Package Status from the PS they will fall back in line and look normal. Our working threory is that these PS's are either being turned off or in some other inaccessible state when some process checks on them during the night or early morning.

The BIG question is...WHAT process checks the environment to ensure the health or status of each PS? Is it one of the scheduled tasks? I know ideally in most environments this doesn't happen because PS's are up all of the time. However in this case we do not work that way. I am sure the DEVs never anticipated this sort of scenerio and therefore I am not surprised in not finding anything documented. But if anyone knows about the process I might be looking for I would appreciate it.

Thank you

Derek

I know you're already aware that the number of package servers you have is not supported.  So that seems like a good cause.  But packages are only reported as invalid if the package server does not report having them in the codebase.  The fact that a package server is off overnight should not cause all of the packages to report as invalid all of a sudden.  Therefore, I suspect another cause in the environment -- like the sheer volume of what you've done with 1500 PS's on a single NS.

Thanks Mike. Believe me I know it's unorthodox but it was required given the type of sites we need to support and the limited windows we have to do our distributions. The other side of the house doesn't have this issue :).

Thank you for the feedback.

SysMonkey

If it's about a limited download window, are you talking the need to pre-stage downloads?  This is now possible in 7.0/7.1, and there are slightly clunky ways to do it (fake command lines) in 6.x.  Might that work?